The drowned world Jon Cattapan works and collaborations

The drowned world
Dr Chris McAuliffe
Director and exhibition curator
Jon Cattapan’s art frequently commences from personal
experience—a fleeting instant in everyday life, a
significant personal crisis, or deeply held belief—so he
has a wealth of stories to tell. Cattapan’s practice is
inseparable from tales both private and public: a
succession of relationships, artistic partnerships,
localities and residences; a deepening engagement
with his materials and an embrace of new technologies;
and a career traversing the boom/bust/recovery rhythm
of the 1980s and 1990s.
Cattapan’s sources are unselfconsciously revealed.
Paintings were made in response to the world outside
his window, to jarring life events, and to the impact of
artists such as Bosch or Tanguy. These are, so to speak,
the internal points of commencement; life, love and the
lure of art itself. Less familiar, but nevertheless
ubiquitous, origins also lie in cinema, digital
technologies and travel. These point to origins in the
new terrain of globalization and digital culture.
Commencing art school in 1975, and maturing over the
course of the 1980s, Cattapan is on the cusp of the
modern and the postmodern. One of modernism’s
classical motifs—the social experience, in extremis, of
the individual within the metropolis—propelled his work
from the outset. And a melancholic fascination with
seductively decrepit cities, inherited from Charles
Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin and JG Ballard, continues
to colour his art. Likewise modernism’s other great
theme—the life of the unconscious, the libidinal
economy of desire—is evident in Cattapan’s oily
dreamscapes.
Simultaneously, Cattapan’s art shows signs of the
emergence of postmodern culture: ‘the change from
atoms to bits’. 1 His cityscapes are fragmented, mobile,
excessively mediated, and dematerialized. The
apocalyptic tone of fin-de-siècle postmodernism has
shaped discussion of Cattapan’s work, but the best
itemisation of his iconography is the fine print of a
domestic insurance policy: fire, flood, theft, injury, act of
God. Shit happens, and it doesn’t stop happening.
Cattapan looks on in fear and fascination.
Cattapan’s watery canvases suggest the slippery
virtuality of postmodern experience. His many images
of surveillance allude to the paranoid experience of
digital culture. The paintings survey the intense but
indistinct terrain of the dream. The sci-fi allegories of
Philip K Dick—everyday life in a city teetering on the
brink of techno-abyss—are there, but also the brutal
and seductive effrontery of Surrealism’s merveilleux
(marvelous).
Cattapan is both a realist and a symbolist, an observer
and a dreamer. His deluge is allegorical; ours is a world
swamped with information. But it is also a real flood,
one that found the artist waist deep in water on a St
Kilda street in 1989. His conflagrations are not only
Freudian symptoms but real blazes in East Melbourne,
St Kilda and Footscray, which brought down a church, a
town hall and a chemical factory respectively. Cattapan
revels in the digital—he produces sketches using a
scanner and Photoshop software—but he speaks in the
analog media of painting and drawing.